I love being home with Ryan and watching him learn and grow. Having a high energy, creative, thinking child also means alot of emotions. As a parent who is laid back somewhat goes with the flow, I am learning how to help my son deal with his high energy emotions in a positive way. I am finding this takes a lot of patience, breathing and thinking things through. I remind myself this is much better than sending him to his room or immediately in time out and then he never learns the right way to communicate.
With all that said , our lessons have gone very well this week. We have decided to start our own Alphabet Journey. Ryan loves the book The Wise Enchanter, An Alphabet Journey by Shelley Davidow. We are reading it for the second time now, so based on this book as well as the alphabet journey from our Donna Simmons curric, We are creating our own story.
It started out the the kingdom can not grow any vegetables and the monster is also eating all the words and letters in the world. It is up to the prince to save the words. He sets out in the forest and finds a hut. Next to the hut are many apple trees and he sees a little lady who's dress he realizes looks like the letter A. We then drew in our books and went around the house trying to find the words that start with the letter A before the monster does. We wrote them in our book .
B - the prince left the little apple lady and came across another house in the woods. This time a bear lived there. He told the prince the story of his family Goldilocks and The Three Bears.
C and D - after leaving the Bear's house it began to pour rain and he dodged the lightning until he found a cave with a door. The D is hard to see in Ryan's picture.
Going back to letting things go and learning to appreciate what Ryan is learning and not focus so much on how "perfect" the picture should be, It was hard for me to watch him with his block crayon drawings. Where I am slow and fluid paying attention to detail, he is ridgid and quick and does not pay attention to detail. I do insist on covering the page with color though. Everything I read in Waldorf, I should be encouraging him to slow down and help him become more rythmatic in his drawings. I do, but then the lessons becomes focused on me saying "slow down" "color this way" "use this side of the crayon" Is this really helping him? I am learning to back off and focus on what our lessons are about and lead more by example.Math - this week we talked about odd and even numbers. He caught on prety quick. We had fun calling out numbers to each other and guessing whether they were odd or even. We played a game where I put a silk in the middle of the floor and put odd numbers on one side and even on the other. WHen I called out a number, he had to jump to the correct side. He loved that.
Then today when Tony went to the store, Ryan went along and they looked at the numbers and decided if they were odd or even. We will need to review in the future , but he gets the idea. We also talked about how only the even numbers can be divided into 2 equal groups. We tried it with the rocks and tried to divide the odd numbers - hands on learning!
********SUGAR!!! After my midwife apt on Monday , I said I was going to try hard to reduce my sugar intake. Ryan decided to go around the house and look at the labels of everything and tell me the sugar content. By everything - I mean everything. Today at the store with Tony, he told him the sugar content of everything they put into the cart. Great nutrition lesson.
*******
HANDWORK - Ryan decided to start back into his knitting. I sat with him a few times and today he actually did some stitches completely on his own. Way to go Ryan.
********
SCIENCE - The Moon and the Solar System.
We started traking the phases of the moon this week. The begining of the week we had a half moon and now today it is almost full. We read books on the moon which lead to books on the solar system. One of our book showed how to make a scale model showing the distance of each planet from the sun. We used our wool felted solar system we made a couple years ago and set to work.
In the picture below the Sun is in the far left followed in order by the planets. about 13 feet 3 inches away is Pluto. We talked about which planets where too hat to live on and which wer too cold. Talking about Pluto lead to a talk about Dwarf Planets. We found out that there are 5 Dwarf Planets including Pluto. Well we needed to wet felt 4 more dwarf planets. Wtih that done we hung thm up in the correct place. 3 of them are way in the outer orbit with Pluto. One is inbetween Mars and Jupiter (it goes on the bathroom door) in the Asteroid Belt.
Ryan decided to paint a picture of what he thought an Asteroid belt would look like. I hung it behind our Dwarf planet.
*********
Random picture
This was taken yesterday when the public schools were cancled and Sage stayed home. The boys decided to have a little jam session.
No comments:
Post a Comment